Category Archives: Useful Info

Technology is an incredible enabler. This is no more present than in Silicon Valley, which lives and breathes technology. But the dirty little secret to Silicon Valley is that probably 90 percent of the companies that start in this region fail, and not because they’re poorly engineered or their technology’s not interesting or right.

It’s usually because nobody really needs the technology. If you want to be successful in business, you have to pay attention to the technology and what it enables you to do, but you also have to do it in the service of a market need.

“Meetings are a waste of time unless you are closing a deal. There are so many ways to communicate in real time or asynchronously that any meeting you actually sit for should have a duration and set outcome before you agree to go.”

Hire for Flexibility

“Zipcar challenged us to think about how we could use a car on an hourly basis instead of a daily basis. I’d like to challenge business people to think about what they would do if they could have talent on demand. Hiring contractors is more cost-efficient than hiring people full-time and less time-consuming than doing it yourself because you can hire an expert for whatever task you need to accomplish.”

Rank Items on Your To-Do List

“Make the next day’s “to do” list before you leave the office. Rate each item A, B, or C based on its importance, and work on A items first. The productiveness of any meeting depends on the advance thought given the agenda, and you should never leave a meeting without writing a follow-up list with each item assigned to one person. And go outside. All the big ideas are on the outside. You’ll never have a creative idea at your desk.

Answer the Phone

“Communication is key. I call the CEO or chairperson of every one of my major clients every day. I like the directness of phone conversations; you don’t miss things the way you do with e-mail. I also carry my cell phone around the building, and my employees do as well. We have a rule: I answer their calls and they answer my calls. Also, cut down on sleep. Why would you sleep when it’s time to live? Sleeping isn’t living. You sleep when you die. I get up at 3:30 every morning and I’m at the gym by 4. Then I ride 25 miles on my bike before breakfast. Being in shape is what gives me energy.”

Organize Your Daily Interruptions

“My executive assistant, Haley Carroll, e-mails me a daily memo, which I read after I go home every night. It’s in four parts, and the first part is my next day’s schedule. Then comes a list of questions that cropped up during the day — maybe someone wants to know whether I have feedback on the new Hudson Yards Catering logo. She aggregates them so she doesn’t have to interrupt me repeatedly during office hours. I’ll respond to those right away. The third part of the e-mail is FYIs: information I don’t have to act on but might like to know. Maybe my mother called to make a reservation for her neighbor next week at Blue Smoke. Or there might be a change in my schedule. Finally, there is a section of longer-term reminders. I promised to write a blurb for a friend’s book. I want to plan a vacation, so I need to check on my kids’ school schedules. We started the memos only last year, and I don’t know how we managed without them. I care about the details. This way, I don’t worry that I’m missing anything.

Always Be Interviewing

“I used to think business was 50 percent having the right people. Now I think it’s 80 percent. The best way to be productive is to have a great team. So I spend more time than most CEOs on human resources. I carry a little notebook with the names of 35 or 40 people in the company, and every week I look at it to make sure I’m in touch with everyone. The top eight or 10 people I’m going to see automatically. But there are always 20 or 30 people who are up-and-comers or one or two levels down, and I wan them to know I’m paying attention. Once a quarter, I go through my list of contacts—a couple of thousand of them—to see if there’s anyone I should be reaching out to about a job. Intensive as all of this is, I ultimately save time, because I can delegate with confidence.

Use E-mail to Document

“When scheduling travel and social activities, I like to communicate plans through e-mail to both family and colleagues to keep an easy record of correspondence rather than relying on a possibly hurried conversation.

Use a Wiki to Capture Ideas

“A lot of productivity is capturing ideas. I use a wiki—it’s more valuable than e-mail for running a company—and I have a page for every person with whom I interact frequently.

Be Extra-Productive During Off-Hours

“I get almost as much done outside normal office hours as during them. I’ll interview people on Saturdays, late at night, early in the morning. If I’m trying to solve a particularly difficult problem, I’ll come in on the weekend, when there’s less going on, and spend a day focusing on it. I read technology manuals and watch video tutorials late at night. During start-up, I think you have the choice of being productive or having a social life, and I’ve choosen being productive.

Always Save Time to Exercise

“With the exception of one or two days a year, I work out every single day. Fitting a workout into the work day reduces stress, keeps you healthy, and is great for getting “alone time” to work out business and personal problems. When someone asks for a non work-related meeting, see if they are up for doing the meeting while running or biking together. Work out at lunchtime and then eat at your desk.

Shrink Your Mental Deadlines

“If I think something is going to take me an hour, I give myself 40 minutes. By shrinking your mental deadlines, you work faster and with greater focus. I also schedule time every week on my calendar for quiet, concentrated PowerTime where I only work on my most important activities. A “Stop Doing” list is as important as a “To Do” list. A “To Do” list is easy, you just keep adding to it and the more you have on it, the more important you may feel. But “Stop Doing” is more difficult because you have to give up some things.

Live by the “Two-Pizza” Rule

“Interaction should be constant, not crammed into meetings once a week. You just turn around in your chair and bounce an idea off one of the other 10 people in your office. Keep the floor plan open so people can talk to each other. As the company gets bigger, keep dividing it into smaller and smaller groups. Follow Jeff Bezos’s two-pizza rule: Project teams should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. At Hunch, we don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary. When I used to have meetings, though, this is how I would do it: There would be an agenda distributed before the meeting. Everybody would stand. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone would drink 16 ounces of water. We would discuss everything on the agenda, make all the decisions that needed to be made, and the meeting would be over when the first person had to go to the bathroom.

Avoid Multitasking

“Don’t multitask. Multitasking is something we all do these days. The problem is our brains just aren’t cut out for it. When you multitask, you’re interfering with your brain’s ability to perform at max-capacity. Yes, you can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can fold laundry while talking to a friend on the phone. Clowns can ride a unicycle while juggling brightly colored balls. These are role tasks that don’t demand a lot of brain power. But in most cases, multitasking=lesstasking. When you make those shifts from one context to another, you risk dropping things from your short-term memory. Do one thing at a time, minimize context shifts, maximize brain power!

Review Your Productivity at the End of the Day

“The most difficult aspect of being a CEO is you driving your day, and not letting the day drive you. By looking through tasks each morning and resolving to allocate the time to concentrate on the CEO priorities, the actions only the CEO can take to move the company forward, you can keep your eye on moving the company forward. At the end of the day, I always checked whether I had taken action on my top three priorities. If the answer was “no,” I stayed in the office until I made progress on them.”

Schedule Time to Focus on the Big Picture

“For me, a big part of productivity is being agile. I like to leave a lot of blocks in my day open. On an average day, I’m only 50 percent scheduled, though occasionally it gets as high as 80 percent. That’s imperative, because often something comes up out of nowhere. Recently, for example, an important new partner came to the office and unexpectedly brought the CEO. The team came to me and said, “Oh, my God; their CEO came. Do you have a window this afternoon?” I had a window. And at the end of the hour the CEO and I spent together, we’d identified new markets and positioned the company to be a global as well as domestic partner. If I have a free block and nothing presents itself, I catch up on industry reports, self-education, and big-picture thinking. In a packed schedule, those things can get neglected. They shouldn’t be.”

Commit to a process, not a goal. Don’t just set a goal of creating better customer relationships; commit to calling at least two customers a day to ask how you can better serve them. Don’t just set a goal of landing new clients; commit to cold-calling at least two leads every day. Commit to a process that leads to a goal and you’re much more likely to achieve that goal. Focus on what you will do, not on what you want to happen.

Make Temptations Hard to Reach

Call this the “pain in the butt” technique: when something is hard to do, you’ll do it less. Store sodas in the refrigerator and keep bottles of water on your desk. Put the TV remote in an upstairs closet. Shut down your browser so it’s harder to check out TMZ. Use a “productivity” laptop that intentionally doesn’t have a browser or email, leave your phone behind, and move to a conference room to get stuff done. Convenience is the mother of distraction, so make it a pain in the butt to satisfy your temptations.

Maximize Your Most Important Tasks

All of us have things we do that make the biggest difference. (For me it’s actually sitting down and writing.) What two or three things contribute most to your success? What two or three things generate the most revenue? Then eliminate all the extra “stuff” to the greatest extent possible so you reap the benefits of spending time on the tasks that make you you.

Purposely Allow Less Time for Key Projects

Time is like a new house. We eventually fill a bigger house with furniture, and we eventually fill a block of time with “work.” So take the opposite approach. Limit the amount of time you allow yourself to complete an important task. You’ll be more focused, more motivated, your energy level will be higher… and you’ll actually get more done.

Chunk Housekeeping Tasks

Even though we’d like to focus solely on our most important tasks, we all have stuff we still need to do. Instead of sprinkling those activities throughout the day– or, worse, taking care of them when they pop up– collect and take of them in preplanned blocks. Better yet, schedule that block for when you know you’ll be tired or in need of a mental break. That way you’ll still feel (and be) productive even when you’re not at your best.

Just Say No

You’re polite. You’re courteous. You’re helpful. You want to be a team player. You’re overwhelmed. Say “no” at least as often as you say yes. You can still be polite while protecting your time. And you should protect your time – time is the one asset no one can afford to waste.

Start Small So You Won’t Mind

Say you decided you should cold-call 20 new prospects every day. Great idea – but sounds daunting. Sounds really hard. Sounds almost impossible… so you won’t. Instead, start small. You can call 2 people a day, right? That sounds easy. That you will do. Then, in time, it will feel comfortable to increase the number. Whenever you want to create a new habit, start small so you will actually start – and stick with it through that tough early time when habits are hard to form.

Build In Frequent Breaks

Small, frequent breaks are a great way to refresh and recharge. Like the Pomodoro Technique, a time-management strategy where you work on one task for 25 minutes and then take a 5-minute break. (To time yourself you can use a kitchen timer or your phone…) The key to not burning out is to not let burnout sneak up on you. Scheduling regular short breaks ensures that won’t happen.

Follow the 2-Minute Rule

Here’s one from Getting Things Done: when a task takes less than 2 minutes, don’t schedule it, don’t set it aside for later, don’t set a reminder… just take care of it. Now. Then it’s done. Besides, don’t you have enough on your schedule already?

Actively Schedule Free Time

Free time shouldn’t just happen by accident. Free time shouldn’t be something you get around to if you get a chance. Plan your free time. Plan activities. Plan fun things to do. Not only will you enjoy the planning – and the anticipation – you’ll also actually have more fun. And the happier you are, the more motivated and productive you will be over the long term. Which, of course, is what personal productivity is all about.

We’ve all eaten a heavy lunch that seemed to kill the rest of the day. So take a different approach. See lunch as fuel for your afternoon – and as one meal you knowwill be healthy. Plan to eat a portion of protein that fits in your palm and a couple vegetables or fruits. Make it easy and pack your lunch and then you won’t waste time driving to and from a restaurant.

Drink a Lot More Water

It’s extremely likely you don’t drink enough water. That’s too bad, because feeling good sparks motivation and effort. Plus if you drink water first thing in the morning you’ll boost your metabolism. Drink more water throughout the day and you’ll be less hungry, feel more energetic, decrease your chances of contracting certain diseases… and you’ll have to get up more often to use the restroom which ensures you’re more active throughout the day.

Think about the people you’ve met recently. Who left you feeling more motivated, more excited, more energetic… who made your life better? Then seek to spend more time with them. Surround yourself with people who can improve your life and your life will naturally improve. Sounds obvious – but is also something we all too often forget.

Count Your Blessings Before Bed

Take a second before you turn out the light. In that moment, quit worrying about what you don’t have. Quit worrying about what others have that you don’t. Think about what you dohave. You have a lot to be thankful for. Feels good, doesn’t it? Count your blessings every night and you’ll start the next day in a much more positive way.

Use Your Mind For Thinking, Not Remembering

Here’s another Getting Things Done tip. Don’t clutter your thoughts with mental to-do lists or information you need to remember. Write all those things down. Then you can focus on thinking about how to do things better, how to treat people better, how to make your business better. Don’t waste mental energy trying to remember important tasks or ideas. That’s what paper is for.

Turn Off Alerts

Your phone buzzes. Your email dings. Chat windows pop up. Every alert sucks away your attention. So turn them off. Go alert-free, and once every hour or so take a few minutes to see what you might have missed. Chances are you’ll find out you missed nothing,but in the meantime you will have been much more focused.

Be Inspired By Small Successes

Change is tough. Habits are hard to form. If you want to learn a new skill, don’t decide you’ll become world-class. The goal is too big, the road too long. Instead decide you’ll learn to do one small thing really, really well. Then build on that. Success, even minor success, is motivating and creates an awesome feedback loop that will motivate you to do another small thing really well. One step at a time you might someday become world-class… which, after all, is how that works. Start small, stick with it, and someday your big dream will be a reality.

Stop In the Middle

Take it from Ernest Hemingway: “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day…you will never be stuck.” His advice applies to all kinds of work. When you stop in the middle of a project you know what you’ve done, you know exactly what you’ll do next, and you’ll be excited to get started again.

If you are looking for information on the IVL2-7/5 VFD I’m guessing that you have struggled to find a good location with all the info in one spot. Well look no further because I have done the looking for you (well it was really “I needed it for me” but…) and all the datasheets and information to make them work is here.

So after a bunch of time trying to get an answer from ANYONE about whether Office365 online would work on a Linux machine (Ubuntu 14.04) using Chrome, I finally got an answer.

I searched the web and I got a bunch or outdated information. I called Microsoft support (sales and technical), and they couldn’t tell me.

So I took matters into my own hands and just got a trial subscription and tested it. The short story is that Office365 online version does work with Linux running Chrome version 35.

But the story doesn’t end there. If you are just a standard user and you just want to write documents then you don’t need an Office 365 subscription, you can use it for free on with office online (https://office.com/start/default.aspx) IT IS EXACTLY THE SAME THING

I thought that paying the $100+ per year actually got you additional features that aren’t available with the free office online version; but no, it is exactly the same crippled, feature lacking version.